Hey everyone,

Sorry that this has taken so long to get up to you all and I won't get into the stress and the mess that made it so as it would take a novel in itself to explain fully. Pendragon04 can tell you of my frustration with this chapter but after a little more tweaking and things I'm at least happy to post it for now, with the thoughts of later revision in mind but I need to move this one on so here we go.

Thanks to all my reviewers, at the moment I am needing the encouragement of your reviews so please, if you're reading this, just drop me a line and let me know what you're thinking.

Thanks.

Kayla

Chapter 15: Numb

Jack felt almost in a daze as she walked slowly along The Aurora's corridors to the control room. She didn't know why she went to the control room instead of the Captain's quarters where she had originally been told to go but was rather glad that she did when she saw Captain Manor talking to the elderly doctor who had been pulled out of cryo-sleep to operate on Candace, not that he had had a problem doing so.

He was around sixty years old, a short man with greased over grayish black hair and a slow, tired kind of walk. His eyes were bright blue and alert, eyes that belonged more to a young man in a way rather then the older doctor. It was those blue, blue eyes and the man's steady but soft smile that had made Jack trust him almost immediately. Not many people could say that they had gained her trust basically without trying so the fact that he had was little more then miraculous.

"Cryo-sleep might not be so good for the girl." The doctor was saying to the Captain with a frown on his face.

"What do you mean? I thought that Kirsten said that it would lessen the pain and help her to heal." Jack asked stepping inside the room with out an invitation and ran a hand through her hair as she looked at the doctor with her own style of frown on her face. The mixture of emotions that were still on her mind on top of the worry for the teenager giving her a small headache that pounded at the back of her skull.

"Ahh...Miss Stewart, we were going to be going along to the Captain's quarters to meet you soon to discuss the arrangements but since you are here instead of there..." The Doctor, Ian Loring, greeted her with one of his smiles.

"Jack, I thought you'd be on your way there by now." Tex Manor looked slightly confused.

"I am sir, I was, I just kinda ended up here instead. I dunno why, just walked in this direction without thinking too much about it. Sorry." She smiled back at Dr. Loring. "Why wouldn't cryo-sleep be good for Candace Dr. Loring?" She couldn't help it, she had a one-track mind and at that moment, Candace was what was at the forefront.

"It freezes a lot of the body's natural functions. That includes some of the bodies healing and regenerative powers, even parts of the immune system have been known to shut down whilst in cryo-sleep."

"That doesn't make sense. I mean, you don't even age when you're in cryo, how can it shut down some of the bodies regenerative abilities?" Jack asked.

"The gases that they use to keep a person in cryostasis only allow certain functions that are natural for the body to take place and without some of those particular functions there is the possibility of infection or lack of healing taking place." The Dr. explained. "It might be better for her if she was monitored by someone and kept out of stasis. More of a natural healing environment."

"Fine, I'll do it." Jack shrugged as if the decision was no big deal. But she knew that she would use the job more as an excuse to have something to do besides just hanging around Riddick. At that moment in time the teenager's company was fare more preferable to Riddick's. Right then she would rather not ever have to face the questions that she knew she would eventually have to and that meant keeping someone between her and the asker, that and if she didn't do it, it would either be one of the three Cs told to or Kirsten Leal and the less contact the teen had with those scientists the better. "I don't have anything to tie me down when I'm not doing my duties."

"What would your friend think about that?" The Captain sat down and sighed heavily. She shrugged; it seemed that she wasn't the only one having a bad day. There wasn't a lot of good that had happened since landing on that damned planet, not that she had expected anything good too happen.

"It doesn't really matter what he thinks about it. Candace is my responsibility and he doesn't have to like it. It was him after all that acquired her for me therefore he can't really complain." She said.

"I don't have a say in it? Whose responsibility are you Jack?" Riddick said from the doorway as he walked into the room.

"You know what, it doesn't matter. The kid is my responsibility and I will be the one to look after her." She shrugged. "I might be your responsibility, I might be mine considering I am twenty-two years old but that is beside the point right now. Right now, her health is the most important thing." She shook her head. "Is there any problem with me pulling this baby off of planet hell?"

"Not to the girl's heath. I would request however Captain Manor that you would agree to let me stay out of cryo-sleep until I am satisfied with the child's healing progress." The Doctor said folding his arms, not sure what to make of the argument between the pilot and the man who had appeared as if from nowhere.

"Agreed." Captain Manor nodded. "Jack, how soon can you get us off this planet?"

"Right now if you've got everyone onboard. Pre-flight will take about ten minutes and we should be back in the shipping lanes in another twenty minutes tops. After that, we're back on the new schedule." She answered doing a couple of quick calculations in her head.

"Alright, do it then!" Manor nodded.

"Yes sir." Jack answered a smile on her face. Within seconds Jack had left the small control room that had felt crowded the minute that Riddick had turned up and was headed down the hallway to the cockpit.

It was like she lost her focus when he appeared, like the sharp awareness that she had built up since she thought he had died disappeared. It was like he was able to shatter the facade of being unbreakable and then break her.

She hated it!

She loved it!

Jack walked along the corridor a little faster then she had to, partly to get there and partly because she couldn't wait to get away from the planet. She only hoped that Riddick couldn't tell just how aware of him she was, all of her nerves seemed to be trained on his movements. All of the tenseness she used to feel when walking around the ship was gone, she wasn't as nervous any more or afraid, just very aware of him. It was as if there was a bubble or moving cage that surrounded her when Riddick was near. She had her wish, she felt safe, but at what cost? What cost?

She shuddered, upset by her own thoughts but hoping that her attempt to turn her emotions to ice looked successful even if it wasn't. One hand played with the guard on her wrist as she mentally scolded herself. "Who the hell do you think you're kidding Jack?" She mentally screamed at herself. "Riddick can read you too easily to be fooled. You're a stupid bitch sometimes."

"Jack?" Riddick raised his eyebrows in question as she walked into the cockpit and turned around, blocking the entrance with her slight frame, her face set in stone, unyielding and stubborn. He knew that she knew that he could just sweep her aside without her resisting too much but she still held her ground. That was the one thing about Jack; sometimes just the fact that she was willing to stand up to him was enough to earn her a lot of respect from him.

"You had better go back to our room. I'll see you when we're back in the shipping lanes. Until then, I want you to let me do my job in peace." Jack said and closed the door to her small sanctuary slightly surprised that he had let her.

There was peace in the small room, for Jack, among the controls there had always been peace. The room itself and its instruments never changed with out planning and permission. The two seats, the monitors and control panels. Jack knew the room intimately, understood the switches and buttons, the leavers...everything. She knew how things were meant to feel and where they were meant to be, nothing could hide from her in that cockpit. Nothing here needed explanation; nothing here would cause extra complications in her life. It was all safe, the same and unchanging.

Her hands moved swiftly over the panels, powering up the ship, doing the job of pilot and co-pilot simultaneously. This was her peace, her chance to lose herself, a time to become a part of the ship's more complex workings. Here she was something more then herself and she revealed in the realization of that fact.

"Powering cells. Ship sealed and fully pressurized. Engine's warming. Life support and artificial gravity on line and at full." Jack said, checking off systems as she moved through her pre-flight routine. "Five minutes till engine fire-up." She said over the headsets and leaned back in her chair, watching the countdown for the engines to be ready for use.

This was Jack's quite time but now, it was marred by the thoughts in her head, her own humiliation. Gods, she had been acting like a bloody teenager!

Her hands ran nervously through her hair. She could be so fucking stupid sometimes, she found Riddick again and because she decided to be honest she had screwed it up. He didn't want anyone to love him, to care about him so why had she made herself tell him that she did. He would leave again and she would have to go back to depending on herself. It was one thing to protect someone that you felt you had an obligation to but finding out that because you had protected them and kept them safe, they had seen another side of you and because of that loved you was another thing altogether.

"Maybe it would be the best for both of us that way. If he left." She told herself out loud. After all, there was a good fifteen years between them. When he looked at her, she was pretty damn sure that all he saw was the fifteen-year-old that he had saved seven years earlier. The kid that got them into trouble, that took her anger and pains and insecurity out with her fists in stupid brawls.

What a kid she had been then, she had done well at emulating Riddick's don't mess with me attitude and for the most part because of it, she had been left alone. There had always been the odd one or two who had hazarded to get close, young men, mainly, who were either intrigued by her attitude or who wanted one thing and one thing only. They never got it and the others often ended up getting her in trouble with over excitable teenage wanna-be sluts, some had been older then in their teens though.

Didn't matter where she was, she seemed to attract a good old fight. Only problem was that she never fought like a girl, she wasn't all scratching and hair pulling. She packed a punch and often ended a fight with a blade at her opponent's throat and a growled warning to leave her alone, yet another thing she had learned worked pretty well from Riddick. It was a release of sorts, it was a way to sort out what Riddick taught her and in a way it was a way to prove to herself that she could be tough if she had to be, that she could look after herself without Riddick's help. It was partly an independent streak in her and part of it was just that she liked to fight sometimes, get rid of her aggression.

The bitch in her wasn't a side that Riddick ever saw often in their time together, not unless he happened to be around when a fight was boiling or turned up on time to see it end. Most of the time on occasions like that, he ended it for them and dragged her the hell away. She would get lectured after it for drawing attention to them; he would rather that she was a quiet ghost so for the most part she had been that way for him, but she had her moments when being the quiet ghost was too much for her.

She sighed deeply as the engine light turned green and the monitor showed them ready for use. It was time to leave hell.

"Flick power one on, power two on, powering three. Engines are up." She thought through the list as she prepared thrusters and her hands moved across the panels, she was all ready to take The Aurora into space.

"Flight crew, prepare for take off. Initiating countdown. Ten, nine, eight, seven..." Jack steadily counted them down to take off but instead of starting on one she grinned to herself and sent out a final though to her crewmates. "Buckle your seatbelts guys, we're leaving planet hell."

Jack pushed the leaver that flooded the engine with power from the cells and the ship moved forward a couple of hundred yards before lifting off the ground and heading for the planet's skies. The atmosphere seemed to be fighting them every step of the way, not wanting them to leave the cursed planet of endless days and endless night. But hell if she was going to stay.

"We don't seem to be going up much hotshot." Captain Manor's voice broke through her concentration and she gritted her teeth.

"I'm doing my best sir. There's fight from the planetary atmosphere that I didn't think would be quite so bad. At this rate, it will be six minutes before we leave the gravitational pull of the planet for open space." She said diverting a little more energy to the engines.

The ship lurched to one side suddenly and she lost a little bit of breath as she was thrown to the side hitting her already sore shoulder and ribs against the side of the seat. She gritted her teeth and tried to ignore the lack of breath as she struggled to get the ship level and keep its nose in the air. "Shit, shit, shit!" She whispered as she struggled against the atmospheric currents and tired to ignore the pain.

"What the hell..." Captain Manor said suddenly.

"Do you want me to explain or fly the fucking ship?" She asked through gritted teeth as she tried to ignore the curses of surprise that the rest of the crew were making. There was no response and she adjusted a few settings quickly. "Pull it together Jack." She said to herself gripping the control so hard her knuckles turned white with exertion.

"Come on Jack, you gotta get us outa here, the kid looks fare to chuck." Sam said a note of concern in her voice. She grimaced and gave the boosters on the starboard side a little more power, trying to even the ship out.

"I think this planet wants us to stay. Maybe we'll get stuck here until the next long night." Danny said mockingly but there was a hint of fear hidden behind his comment. A shiver ran up her spine. If they did, it would all be her fault.

"Shut the fuck up Becker." Sam and Jack snapped at the same time as the ship leached again and they lost some altitude. Jack's stomach was suddenly at her feet. Fear hit her almost as hard and for a moment she didn't know what to do.

"I need a co-pilot up here now! Riddick or Becker, I really don't care who, but one of you get your ass up here now!" She snapped as four separate systems showed up on the monitor with warnings and their panels flashed red and orange. "Don't do this to me now. Please don't do this to me now!" She whispered to the ship. She got no response from either of the men or the ship.

"What's going on Jack?" Riddick's voice asked through the headset a few minutes later as he opened the door and walked in.

"Take a look around. We've hit three pressure pockets so far and I'm having a hard time lifting the nose and gaining altitude. And the fact that all these fucking systems need attention I can't give them right now isn't helping me much. I need more damn hands." She said, one hand holding tightly to the controls trying to pull their nose a little further up as the other sought to fix what she could of the other systems. Riddick buckled himself in the co-pilot's chair and shoved her hand off the system's panels.

"You get the nose in the air, leave the rest to me. "He said.

"Can you get me any more power from the cells John? A little extra would help lift us out of this pocket." She said pulling a couple of leavers and pulling the nose of the ship up a little further trying to ignore the groaning in the welding as the ship powered forward breaking through one pocket only to move into another one.

"Will do what I can." John acknowledged and Jack looked momentarily across the panels to see Riddick's hands moving with skill and certainty but then she had always known that he was a good pilot, she had watched him pilot them through some pretty bad situations in the past and he had been the first to teach her how to pilot. She didn't have to worry about him the same way she might have had Danny been the one to arrive to help her.

"Come on! Pull us through, pull us through." She whispered to the ship as John diverted some power, giving her enough to punch them out of the atmosphere and into space.

Relief flooded her as she slacked off the speed and drove the ship out into the shipping lanes. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute as The Aurora pulled into clear and well-charted space. There was nothing but stars in the shipping lanes and there wasn't much in between them and those lanes.

"Starting full systems check and setting auto-pilot." Jack said licking her dry lips, fear of crashing on that planet for the second time still sending chills up her spine and that was a fear she had never thought she would encounter again. "How bad is the damage to the rest of this ship John?"

"Am checking up now. We got a little battered going up there but no hull breaches." John answered. "We were lucky Jack, didn't think we'd make it for a while there."

"Thank God for that or we wouldn't have had a chance." Jack nodded.

"How many of those pressure pockets did we hit exactly?" Captain Manor asked.

"Five total and then we broke into space." Riddick answered as Jack leaned across him to press a couple of buttons. She was still shaking slightly and no matter how hard it seemed she tired she couldn't stop. She could see in her head, loosing control of The Aurora completely and it spiraling down to hit the planet's surface once more. It would have been like The Hunter-Gratzner all over again and she would have been powerless to stop it.

"I think this planet wants us to stay." Danny's words floated through her head as she programmed the autopilot. "No!" She thought as she set the speed and plotted the best course to take them back to the Masilian Station where The Aurora docked when the crew went back to their homes for down time. "The planet didn't want The Aurora or anyone else on that ship but it did want her." She had escaped it twice.

How she longed for downtime at that moment. To split from Captain Manor who never left his ship, to know Danny and John were back in their rented flat aboard the station, to fly Sam down to Anastre 7 and drive her home before going back to her own flat, a place scarred with memories, scarred but safe.

But things would be different this time.

There was no way that she would let Candace just disappear into foster care, where they would most probably never bother looking for her father. Jack would do what she could to find the kid's merc father and if she couldn't then she would do her best as far as Candace was concerned. She wouldn't make the kid feel the way she had felt at one point in her life. Riddick had made Candace her responsibility and responsibility was one thing that Jack took very seriously.

"And what about Riddick?" A voice in her head asked her. "You need him."

She shuddered. Yes, in some ways she did need him very much but she would never make him stick around under the circumstances. Those same circumstances made her feel very nervous, let alone him.

"You alright?" She had almost forgotten that he was there; she had become so comfortable with his presence. Shit, that was another problem she would have to deal with later.

"Fine." Jack nodded. It was a semi-truthful answer, small safe, simple and unexamineable. It didn't leave much room for unwanted conversation, or at least she thought that it didn't.

"Then what's with the fear?"

"You didn't ask me if I had been afraid." She answered with a shrug.

"I wasn't using the past tense and I didn't have to ask if you were afraid or not, I already knew that."

"Damn your heightened senses!" She said slamming down a leaver a little harder then she had needed to. "What gave it away this time?" There was aggression in her tone.

"What?" He looked at her his eyebrows raised.

"Oh gods!" Jack looked at him and took a slow deep breath. "I'm sorry. I'm not used to people being able to read me like that anymore. Things changed hellaofa lot for me after there was no you. I learned to look after myself, to hide what I was thinking and feeling and now I can't. It's not only that, I feel bloody transparent. I mean, gods, what is there about me that you don't know?"

"Not a lot." Riddick was frowning.

"You see through me, you know when I'm scared or upset or angry, you know almost everything there is to know about me except for the things I haven't told you about the past two years, the things that I wouldn't want you to find out about and the new scars. You have no reason to stay here, I'm not a child any more and I don't technically need your protection. I'm going to end up leading you into more danger then anything else if you stick around." She looked plain exasperated with herself. "Trust me; I am not good for you to be around at the moment."

"What do you mean?"

"Candace's father is a merc Riddick. When you made her my responsibility, I decided to find him for her and if I can't find him then I'll be the one doing my best to help a teenager get over her losses. You did it for me once and I'll do my best for her. If she has family out there, and I can find them then I will. She deserves a chance at having a real family." She looked at him desperate for him to understand. "I still don't know why you came looking for me after two years away from me in the first place. And I don't see how you would want to stick around now. I am a mess Riddick."

"That's why I am here Jack."

"You don't have to pick up this mess Riddick. You saved my ass and handed me a life, you don't have to try and pick up the pieces of that too." Jack shook her head.

"Do you want me to stick around?"

"That's not the point Riddick. You don't need to get dragged into my shit."

"Answer the fucking question Jack."

"Selfishly, yes, I want you to be around. I crave the way you make me feel, the safety. I'm sick of not being able to be myself and with you I can be me, I love that. I want more from you then it would ever be fair to ask and because of that I want you to stay. Doesn't mean you should."

"You wanna explain yourself a little clearer?"

"Not really." She shrugged. "Why did you go looking for me anyway? I mean, it took you two years."

"Dunno. Wanted to see how you were doing. Had a feeling you might need me."

"What happened to you not being a superhero?"

"Never claimed to be one."

"Did you find out what you wanted to? By finding me again."

"Not everything no." He answered truthfully and she clenched her jaw for a moment while she looked at him. It was a hard thing to take sometimes, his honesty that was.

"What is there that you still want to know? I'll tell you, all you have to do is ask the questions, only problem is you might not like many of the answers." She said a moment later as the autopilot program took over and she leaned back in her chair. She waited for him to say something, ask a question, anything but he didn't.

"What are you trying to do here Jack?"

"What do you mean?" She cocked her head slightly as she watched him.

"Offering yourself to questions."

"Making it easy for you to find out what it is you want to know, after that you can leave if that's what you want." She answered him. "I don't want to make your life more complicated."

"Who said I wanted to leave?"